Proof that democracy without protection for unfavorable minorities is a sham. I did see one hopeful thing from that article, though:

Clear majorities also backed burqa bans in Germany, Britain and Spain, while two out of three Americans opposed it, the survey found.

At least Americans understand the value of free expression. I would be stunned that Germany doesn't, but Germany is one of the most restrictive countries in the Eurozone when it comes to freedom of expression (thanks to the neo-Nazis).

jfiling wrote:Proof that democracy without protection for unfavorable minorities is a sham. I did see one hopeful thing from that article, though:

Clear majorities also backed burqa bans in Germany, Britain and Spain, while two out of three Americans opposed it, the survey found.

At least Americans understand the value of free expression. I would be stunned that Germany doesn't, but Germany is one of the most restrictive countries in the Eurozone when it comes to freedom of expression (thanks to the neo-Nazis).

jfiling wrote:Proof that democracy without protection for unfavorable minorities is a sham. I did see one hopeful thing from that article, though:

Clear majorities also backed burqa bans in Germany, Britain and Spain, while two out of three Americans opposed it, the survey found.

At least Americans understand the value of free expression. I would be stunned that Germany doesn't, but Germany is one of the most restrictive countries in the Eurozone when it comes to freedom of expression (thanks to the neo-Nazis).

Nuh uh, ever hear Kraftwork?

Even Germany's highest courts have found exceptions to freedom of speech to ban the neoNazis.

This act prevents the French from credibly criticizing governments that require the burqua. That's the problem. As much as they feel this is necessary to enable assimilation...or provide for national security...or whatever their various rationales might be...it's always troubling to see government interfering with free religious expression. We expect it (although we shouldn't condone or excuse it) in Saudi Arabia, but this is supposed to be enlightened Europe we're dealing with here.

IMO, you have to draw the line at pragmatic issues like prohibiting veiling for ID card photos, but beyond that it's hard to justify this.

I'm sure it has to do with the more advanced state of Islamization in their culture as compared to ours...but it's troubling nonetheless.

Claire Berlinski is an American living in Istanbul, who has written compellingly about this issue. The other side of the argument is no less troubling. Tough, tough dilemma...there is tremendous pressure on women to cover in Turkey (and in many European cities as well)...all kinds of social stigma is involved...job discrimination for the woman (and the husband)...etc, affects women who do not choose to veil. Basic women's rights are at risk, and no perfect solutions exist.

But banning the burqua sets a terrible precedent for a modern western nation to limit religious expression....no matter what the pragmatic reasons may be.

"I believe it is the nature of the human species to reject what is true but unpleasant and to embrace what is obviously false but comforting." H.L. Mencken

Love child of shawn kemp wrote:The burqa is more a statement about women's place in society than religious expression in my opinion. They are made to wear them because they are not truly individuals in their society.

No doubt about it. But I think you have to allow for those women who are devout believers...and who do freely choose to cover...though I'd agree that for the most part they are doing it out of cultural inertia, intimidation, fear and social stigma attached to not doing it. As serious as that is, it's not the point...

It's that the government is making the decision for them, and that's a bad precedent to set. In some places, it has already morphed into bans on "large" (whatever that is) crosses worn as necklaces or elsewhere on the person....done as a hedge against the charge that this is strictly an anti-Islam thing.

"I believe it is the nature of the human species to reject what is true but unpleasant and to embrace what is obviously false but comforting." H.L. Mencken

jfiling wrote:BTW, depending on how one looks at Christianity, one can easily conclude that it is a totalitarian death-cult that is stuck in the seventh century. Glass houses, and all that.

Easily.

Because nothing screams totalitarianism like "love thy neighbor as thyself"

I love it when people have to go back five or six hundred years...(or more predictably 1000, to the Crusades)to cite any examples by Christians qua Christians of the kind of barbarism practiced daily in 2010 Islam...in order to establish their moral equivalence argument.

(Come to think of it, Islam is the reason we have the word "barbarian" in the language, defined as it is.)

Herm said it wasn't worth it, and he may be right...but I have a hard time letting stuff like this go unchallenged. Nothing personal.

"I believe it is the nature of the human species to reject what is true but unpleasant and to embrace what is obviously false but comforting." H.L. Mencken

jfiling wrote:BTW, depending on how one looks at Christianity, one can easily conclude that it is a totalitarian death-cult that is stuck in the seventh century. Glass houses, and all that.

Easily.

Because nothing screams totalitarianism like "love thy neighbor as thyself"

I love it when people have to go back five or six hundred years...(or more predictably 1000, to the Crusades)to cite any examples by Christians qua Christians of the kind of barbarism practiced daily in 2010 Islam...in order to establish their moral equivalence argument.

(Come to think of it, Islam is the reason we have the word "barbarian" in the language, defined as it is.)

Herm said it wasn't worth it, and he may be right...but I have a hard time letting stuff like this go unchallenged. Nothing personal.

I used that time frame because Herm used it.

I could easily say all the JudeoChristianIslam beliefs are stuck thousands of years in the past, because they are all based on events that nobody reliable recorded, and have never been repeated in modern times. I just see no reason to turn this into an atheism vs. theism debate.

I'd rather stick to my point that painting all Muslims as, to use your word, "barbarians" is unfair at best, and willfully ignorant at worst. Anyone here who wants to condemn a religion because people have killed it its name had better take a good hard look in the mirror unless they can say that their religion has never had people kill in its name. You might see a barbarian if you look hard enough, especially if you have enough hate in your heart to say something like "The worse Muslims are treated in the West, the better off the rest of us are." Nevermind that saying that gives Muslims the license to say "The worse Christians are treated in the East, the better off the rest of us are."

jfiling wrote:painting all Muslims as, to use your word, "barbarians" is unfair at best

which is why I never said it.

I called certain behavior in the Islamic world today...and I don't think I need to list examples....barbarism. Because that's what it is. And we have the word "barbarian" because of Islam. Not an opinion.

If you have to go back 600 years to find anything analogous done by Christians, then your analogy breaks down pretty quick. That's all.

And it wasn't a matter of "looking hard enough" to see barbarism. Their barbarism flew right into two skyscrapers in New York City and into the Pentagon. They sawed Daniel Pearl's head off with a knife on Internet video. The stories of the schoolgirls they maim with acid in Afghanistan in the name of Islam are available on my TV 24/7.

No American has to look very hard to find their barbarism...as long as they have their eyes open.

"I believe it is the nature of the human species to reject what is true but unpleasant and to embrace what is obviously false but comforting." H.L. Mencken

Love child of shawn kemp wrote:The burqa is more a statement about women's place in society than religious expression in my opinion. They are made to wear them because they are not truly individuals in their society.

No doubt about it. But I think you have to allow for those women who are devout believers...and who do freely choose to cover...though I'd agree that for the most part they are doing it out of cultural inertia, intimidation, fear and social stigma attached to not doing it. As serious as that is, it's not the point...

It's that the government is making the decision for them, and that's a bad precedent to set. In some places, it has already morphed into bans on "large" (whatever that is) crosses worn as necklaces or elsewhere on the person....done as a hedge against the charge that this is strictly an anti-Islam thing.

Gotta run now, but I do like how you contextualized this issue, wiz. I may not agree with what I understand all your point to be, but I do respoect the direction for making this a better forum.

jfiling wrote:BTW, depending on how one looks at Christianity, one can easily conclude that it is a totalitarian death-cult that is stuck in the seventh century. Glass houses, and all that.

JMhO...

I think "christians" in them thar hills dancing with rattle snakes in extasy are bat shit crazy.

I think Unitarians are really balanced individuals who have a faith that can be neither proven nor unproven until we obtain total consciousness, if indeed we ever do.

I think the Catholic church hopelessly politicized away anything remotely resembling a meaningful, individual, faith experience many centuries ago for secular reasons realted to wealth and power and is now mired in a theological and moral abyss that is nearly completely irrelevant and wholley incompatible for a citizen of a modern western nation.

I think conservative baptist political types are essentially anti-enlightenment and the biggest threat to America as was an ideal coming away from the age of political enlightenment.

It floors me that anyone can be a truly fundamentalist christian in 2010 given the body of available knowledge. I mean, jaw dropping, head shaking incredulity.

I believe anyone who believes End of Days should be banned from any political office.

I believe that most christains who keep their faith to themselves and lead ethical lives are my friends and neighbors and I respect their faith.

I believe the Boook of Morman is funny.

I can go on and on...

All extremists and fundameltalists are two sides of the same coin, cut from the same cloth. A pox on them all.

Too many don't want to expend the energy to understand the obvious that it is the same with Islam.

The social & political influence of organized western religion are largely shaped by educational, cutural and economic forces. The fact of the matter is that existance in conservative/reactionary pure Islamic states is so bleak that death just isn't an unviable option.

Again, you have to see that HBO documentary to make the lock tumblers click.

While I have a severe problem with goverment intervention in just about anything, I also have a severe problem with acceptance of a backwoods bloodthristy religion being forced down my throat.

Fuck islam, snake charmers, Bernard Law, who, btw, is still not dead, and the whole lot of them. Fuck their dress codes.

I don't fucking care about your fucking burka, islamoworld...

No masks in public or I get to at least point and laff at how stupid you look, burkabroad

The fact is, until the muslum world starts becomming more vocal and vociforous in its attempts at condeming the extremists, 'I/we' have a right to be suspicious of 'you' and I will persue my recent idea of the manufacturing of Koran urinal cakes

Hope is a moment now long pastThe Shadow of Death is the one I castKoo koo ka joob....I am the Walrus

I have a keen eye for these things and watching that HBO documentary I saw something at least interesting to me. One of those uber-fem women shopping at the mall in her near totally covered burqa was wearing some really nice stiletto pumps. Not 5-inch stripper types, but hot business woman types.

"Dear Darryl,I understand the importance the resurrection story holds in your particular religion. If I too knew some guy that had been killed and placed inside a cave with a rock in front of it and I visited the cave to find the rock moved and his body gone, the only logical assumption would be that he had risen from the dead and is the son of God. Once, my friend Simon was rushed to hospital to have his appendix removed and I visited him the next day to find his bed empty. I immediately sacrificed a goat and burnt a witch in his name but it turned out that he had not had appendicitis, just needed a good poo, and was at home playing Playstation.Someone probably should have asked "So the rock has been moved and he's gone... has anyone checked his house?" I realise Playstation was not around in those days but they probably had the equivalent. A muddy stick or something. I would have said "Can someone please check if Jesus is at home playing with his muddy stick, if not, then and only then should we all assume, logically, that he has risen from the dead and is the son of God."If we accept though, that Jesus was the son of an Infinite Being capable of anything, he probably did have a Playstation. Probably a Playstation 7. I know I have to get my offspring all the latest gadgets. God would probably have said to him, "I was going to wait another two thousand years to give you this but seeing as you have been good... just don't tell your mother about Grand Theft Auto."

Criminals in this town used to believe in things...honor, respect."I heard your dog is sick, so bought you this shovel"

"I'm a Christian by choice," he told a woman who asked why he's a Christian. "My mother was one of the most spiritual people I knew, but she didn't raise me in the church.

"So I came to my Christian faith later in life and it was because the precepts of Jesus Christ spoke to me in terms of the kind of life that I would want to lead--being my brothers' and sisters' keeper, treating others as they would treat me."

He acknowledged that the United States is a predominantly Christian nation, while paying homage to its religious diversity.

For himself, though, he said that, "understanding that Jesus Christ dying for my sins spoke to the humility we all have to have as human beings, that we're sinful and we're flawed and we make mistakes, and that we achieve salvation through the grace of God.

"But what we can do, as flawed as we are, is still see God in other people and do our best to help them find their own grace. And so that's what I strive to do. That's what I pray to do every day. I think my public service is part of that effort to express my Christian faith."

Absolutely nothing controversial or objectionable here from where I sit, but I do have a couple of questions for JB and perhaps others here in this thread who have expressed the sentiment that Christians are, to quote JB, "batshit crazy".

In his "I believe" statement of belief earlier in this thread, JB allows that Unitarians (who reject the divinity of Christ) are somewhat sane and are OK people, and he does admittedly qualify that "batshit crazy" belief by suggesting that those Christians who keep quiet about their faith are less objectionable than those who take seriously Christ's imperative to, you know...spread the word. By these lights, Obama doesn't appear to qualify...here he is actually talking in public about his faith in Christ as Redeemer of his sins). So...

[i] "I'm a Christian by choice," he told a woman who asked why he's a Christian. "My mother was one of the most spiritual people I knew, but she didn't raise me in the church.

"So I came to my Christian faith later in life and it was because the precepts of Jesus Christ spoke to me in terms of the kind of life that I would want to lead--being my brothers' and sisters' keeper, treating others as they would treat me."

Starting from the end, I find it disturbing that Obama wants to be anyone's "keeper", although I'm sure he's using that word in some obscure sense that isn't as offensive as I find it.

Mostly, though, I have no problems with following the teachings attributed to Jesus in the Bible. There are plenty of philosophers who have fine things to say about how one should live, but I don't need to feel that they have some claim to divinity to accept their teachings. I really think Obama is being disingenuous with his claims regarding his faith, mostly to try and cuddle up to the believers in this country.

Imagine if wearing a burqua applied to you. If everytime you left the house you had to dress head to toe in black. If you were not permitted to show any individuality in public. And if you so much as showed your face you would suffer the wrath of your family and neighbors.

I was in a crowded public space with 2 muslim families last month. The 2 men sat together on one side of the room. The 2 women, covered head to toe, sat on the other with the children. When you see it in person, mixed in with our culture, it is stark and shocking. What is most shocking about it is how many Americans see this as acceptable behavior.

If it was part of the culture in say, Texas, that all white women could not show their faces in public, drive cars, hold jobs, the rest of this country would rightfully not permit it. No Texan would be able to mix with the rest of society and not get glares or sneers or be accosted. There would almost certainly be a law passed banning this sort of inhumane treatment of women.

So for the first time ever, I say good for the French. They are standing up for a small subset of people in their country - hardcore muslim women - who are being badly mistreated.

The problem of forced veiling...the Muslim cultural imperative to cover...even in the West, is what led the French to act as they did. It is understandable, even admirable, given the legitimate concerns for the rights of women...as JB says....all culture isn't relative.

All of which makes the statement by the political leadership on this side of the ocean all the more empty and unhelpful, IMO.

Obama has bravely stood up (in his famous Cairo speech, among other times) for women's rights to wear the burqa if they wish to...without a word of concern about the problems faced by women who lack the right not to wear a covering.

Obama sums up the U.S. position... "Our basic attitude [in America] is that we're not going to tell people what to wear."

As if American Muslims are being systematically prevented from wearing the burqa or headscarf...they're clearly not...so that's a rather large strawman. What would be helpful from the President would be a message of our position on cultures that oppress the female half of their populations and deny them basic human rights. On that issue, he punts, at least when he had the audience (Cairo) that most needed to hear a strong moral, authentically feminist position from the leader of the free world. Sad.

He might well have added to the above statement that..."but we have no condemnation for those countries and cultures who do force women to wear the burqa, or to deny them civil rights in other ways as well." Here apparently, the President parts company with the argument JB and I and many others are making here that culture isn't all relative

From a year ago, an article articulates the differences in the positions taken by the two western Presidents:

In the battle of the burqa, the two Western presidents from two international defenders of freedom, France and America, are finding no common ground.

On Monday, French President Nicolas Sarkozy forcefully condemned the burqa, the traditional female dress for some segments of Islam that covers a woman from head to toe, as a form of enslavement. And he vowed to ban it from the French republic.

Mr. Sarkozy's position, offered in a speech to Parliament, followed by less than a month American President Obama's opposite take on the subject of covering by Muslim women.

In his Cairo speech to the Muslim world earlier this month, Mr. Obama called on Western countries "to avoid dictating what clothes a Muslim women should wear," saying such action constituted "hostility" towards religion clothed in "the pretense of liberalism."

To seal the Franco-American fashion debate, the issue subsequently divided the two leaders – both male, it should be noted – when they met in Normandy to commemorate the 65th anniversary of D-Day on June 6.

Having suffered the lightning wrath of some French women's groups for his Cairo comments, Obama reiterated: "Our basic attitude [in America] is that we're not going to tell people what to wear."

Sarkozy's response was also based on a defense of freedom, though from a different perspective. "A young woman can wear a head scarf," he said, "provided that's a decision she made freely and had not been forced on her by her family or entourage."

The difference broadly comes down to one of "freedom to" versus "freedom from." Obama is defending a woman's right to dress as she chooses, especially when it comes to expressing her religious belief. Sarkozy, too, is motivated by a vision of a woman's right, but in his case it's a freedom from coercion by those who would impose a symbol of second-class status.

Sarkozy's position is grounded in the vision of a fiercely secular French republic that respects the freedom of religion, but which discourages expressions of religious difference in public settings like schools and other public institutions.

Obama's, on the other hand, follows the traditional American respect for different cultural communities and religions under the broad umbrella of universal freedoms.

In the US, Obama faces criticism from some Muslim women, like Karima Bennoune, an Algerian-American teaching at University of Michigan Law School, who sees Obama's words as accommodating the "law of the Brothers" – family members and community fundamentalists who would impose a symbol of subservience on sisters and other women.

Sarkozy faces periodic public protests from French Muslim women who demand the right to wear the religious symbols they choose – and who deride what they see as their French sisters' attention to fashion (and skimpy dress) as its own form of enslavement.

For some US observers, Obama's stand on the scarf and the burqa has simply been too one-sided. In his Cairo speech, Obama "talked about the right of Muslim women to wear the veil, particularly in the West," says James Phillips, a Middle East expert at the Heritage Foundation in Washington. "What he didn't talk about was their right not to wear the veil."

---

Their positions aren't "opposite" each other, as the article says, but Obama's does reflect the multiculturalism infecting our foreign policy. In this case, equal rights for women are subjugated to multiculti "respect" for cultural differences in the Muslim world. Meanwhile, here at home, he's standing up for women's "right" to veil.

How courageous and principled...and meaningless.

"I believe it is the nature of the human species to reject what is true but unpleasant and to embrace what is obviously false but comforting." H.L. Mencken

I agree, it's wrong to force anyone to wear something that's really only become a "religious requirement" in the last 50 years. It's an odd subject though. Turkey a majority muslim country, banned all head coverings from their schools and universities. But women sued and said it infringed on their right to get an education, so they relaxed the law. The hijab, burka, and chardon are all still banned though.

Fire Marshall Bill wrote:Seems they coulda taken David Koresh from thr children more than once, thereby negating the need to take the children from Koresh... and have them die in the process.

But I never really expected any more from the administration in charge at the time after they defended a sniper who provided a head shot to a woman holding her baby.

Yes to the first, and a million yeses to the second. Janet Reno fucked up the Waco deal big time, and she was just following the crappy precedent set by the Bush administration in the Ruby Ridge incident. I never thought we'd agree on something like this, FMB.

jb wrote:For me the key is whether you believe that women who "choose" to wear the burqua are "free" to make that choice.

I know what I believe, but then again, I thought the government was right to try to take the kids from David Koresh.

Seems they coulda taken David Koresh from thr children more than once, thereby negating the need to take the children from Koresh... and have them die in the process.

But I never really expected any more from the administration in charge at the time after they defended a sniper who provided a head shot to a woman holding her baby.

Just, ya know, sayin'

As for the burqua ban, viva la France'

I never said shit about the execution, FMB. That, um, could have gone better, eh? What I meant was that given the allegations, I supported taking the kids pending an investigation.

My anaolgy is only that religious freedom only goes so far before western civilized values need to play the trump. There are limits and a polemic of "Congress shall make no law" and what we see some religions do.